ROGUE LEADER
NABOO
If there was a name for what this time of year was to him, Kelly didn’t know what it was, but this year it was the most familiar of things: deployment. Scuttlebutt was the fleet was in ready state due to some combination of intelligence and Jedi foresight and his leave was being cut short.
It was all the same to him; at least out there was the most familiar thing in the ‘verse. Twenty-four years, six in the service, two in the academy, and walking away from his commission and the patriotism that once held him in a solid grip was the second-hardest thing he’d ever done, but the break wasn’t clean, though that ache had been dulling for a while now.
That was a choice, to leave. One he wouldn't have managed to make when he did, if not for the counsel of his older sister.
What dwelt most in his thoughts at this time, thought, wasn’t his decision, and he kept himself busy in the face of it. Most of the time that meant getting greasy, like today. It wasn’t the Garage, but he’d take any workshop or hanger that had him into the guts of something mechanical, and this day, he was buried shoulder-deep into an N-1 at Theed Hangar, reaching for a connection.
“Almost got it…”
At some point, he’d stopped driving himself mad over what he could have done differently. Stopped looking for faults that weren’t there. There were no answers then, and none now. But that was as far as he’d gotten, at least with his heart and head, though his body had no such hang-ups, and he had few reservations about scatching that itch when it arose.
It staved off enough of the questions. Fingers hooked around the wire and he carefully worked it free of the connection point.
“...there! S’all yours.”
Precarious with the engine hanging so close to his head, but with that tether cleared, so was the danger to his braincase as the block of inner workings was wheeled away to make room for a replacement.
He released the breath he’d been holding in that last stretch, but still remained bent over the frame of the starfighter’s engine bay, only hauling himself up enough to plant his forearms on the edge of it. Kelly started to work a hand free of a glove, giving a cursory glance around the inside of the busy hanger as he did, checking to see if there was something else to get stuck into…
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